What Now?
by Anakerie
Summary: Sawyer reflects back on his life, and his growing feelings for Sayid. Sayid attempts to reassure Sawyer's doubts. Non-graphic slash. If slash offends you, read something
1. Default Chapter

What Now?

Everybody here has a story to tell, I guess. There was a reason we were all in Australia, a reason we were all on that plane heading to Los Angeles. Lost Angeles, I used to call it when I was little, and man if that doesn't ever seem fitting now.

I have a story too, although it's not exactly epic. Up until now, there wasn't much in my life that hadn't happened in the lives of a million other people. No one likes to think of themselves as ordinary and boring, but there's a comfort in that as well. It's a fucking security blanket, to be honest, knowing what each day is going to bring. That's why I left, you see. Why I had to leave.

Bruce Springsteen wrote about towns like mine, little dirty backwater burgs where the men all worked in factories and the women bagged groceries and turned out the next generation of factory workers. We had a routine going, a nice little pattern, and my family had followed it faithfully for generations.

You're born, and if you're an only kid you don't stay that way for long. Because Say Hallelujah the lord wants you to be fruitful and multiply. Catholics take the wrap for that, but the other religions pretty much feel the same. We were Baptists ourselves, presented each Sunday morning to the First Baptist Church of Richardsburg, Ohio in our best clothes and wearing our best "We love Jesus!" faces.

You grow up, in a run-down house that always needs a fresh coat of paint, with a rusty car in the driveway that always needs chemotherapy. The yard gets mowed once a week, and it's full of dandelions. You have a little tiny backyard, with maybe a rusty swingset, and an old dog lying there in the grass watching you try and kill yourself on it. You share a room with your brothers if you're lucky, or your sisters if you're not. Each night, you sit at the table eating whatever is on your plate (and feeding what you don't like to the dog) and fighting with your siblings over the last piece of Sara Lee cheesecake.

You go to school in the same drafty old red brick building your parents both went to, and you may even have the same teachers that they did. There are thirty of you in a classroom that smells like old coats and classmates who still wet the bed and Mary Alice McHenderson, whose family owns about twenty dogs and is rumored to be 'no good'.

You learn to read and write and do math, and you get notes sent home with you for chewing gum in class or for pulling Mary Alice's hair or for talking too loudly during art class. You find your friends quickly, a group of boys who differ from you only in appearance, and who share your fascination with cartoon shows and treasure hunts. At recess you run wild, as wild as you can behind that chain-link fence. You play kickball and softball, and you get in trouble for throwing rocks through the fence at cars parked outside of the school. All winter long, the sky is gray and frigid and the ground under your Keds is frozen solid, and you and your friends exist in a kind of alternate universe, where you are kings and where there is no such thing as school.

Summer comes and you spend it playing ball in the park, and swimming in the public pool when you can bum enough quarters from your mother. When it rains you stay inside the house waiting impatiently for your mothers' soap operas to end so that you can watch He-Man and Thundercats. When you get bored you make prank phone calls until your mother catches you and makes you clean the bathroom as punishment, and you are angry because your brothers were making calls all morning and she never caught them. You decide you must be adopted. When the rain ends you go outside and look for rainbows and play in puddles with your brothers or sisters, and life is good again.

Then, things change, you change. You leave behind the little brick building and go into a bigger brick building, and you find yourself being suddenly forced to think about your future. What future? A future working in the factories, probably. Still, they fed you lots of lines about how you can go to college or join the army or become doctors and lawyers, and sure, some people do. But good colleges don't want people from little hick towns like yours. They want kids who grew up going to the opera and who work with people dying of diphtheria, and the fact that you were the champion of your high school baseball team three years in a row suddenly doesn't mean jack.

Maybe you do leave town, and move to another little town, and start over there. Maybe you end up marrying Mary Alice and going to work in the textile plant and having a mess of kids with her. Maybe you end up getting drunk and wrapping your car around a telephone pole, but sooner or later you do find yourself grown up and wondering what the hell you do next.

The men in my town gathered together on Saturday nights at Hugg's Tavern, where they talked about their jobs and their favorite sports teams. Where they bashed gays, rich people, anyone who wasn't white, and pretty much anyone else they didn't find appropriate. Did they all really think like that? Everyone claimed to. My friends and I repeated their words to each other as we were growing up, and I can't remember any adult ever telling me that it was wrong. Sure, the Afterschool Specials preached it to me, but what kid wants to be preached to? What kid is going to believe a cartoon character over his own father, whom he has been taught to respect and fear his entire life? Who is perfect in his eyes?

I was eighteen, with a fresh diploma in my hand and a job at Sal's Pizza that I'd held for the past couple of years. I'm the third son, and I have one younger sister who was fifteen. My brothers were both working with Dad at the textile plant, and a week after my graduation Dad comes and tells me that he's gotten me hired as well. My brothers are all happy about it, and they take me out to celebrate at Hugg's. I'm too young to drink legally, but Hugg doesn't care about anything expect his money so I get just as plastered as the rest of my family. My uncles are there too, and so are both of my grandfathers, and they're just as proud as they can be that I'm following in their footsteps.

So the next morning, I wake up, and I can remember everything that happened the night before. My family, and Hugg, and the smell of beer still clings to me. I look at my hands and I wonder what they'll look like after I work in the plant for a few years, and I wonder how they'll look to my kids, and if I should find a girl and ask her to marry me, and something inside of me just snaps all of a sudden.

I don't want this. I run to the bathroom, which smells like Comet, and I puke my guts out. Not from the beer but from this suddenly feeling of panic, like I'm trapped in a cage. I realize for the first time that I can't do this.

So I go back to my room reeking of beer-puke, and I pace around for a while and I wonder "What now?"

College? My grades were lousy, just barely good enough to pass because what was I going to use good grades for anyway? Why study when I could be out with my friends smoking joints and talking about all the imaginary girls I'd done.

It was like the town was surrounded by a huge desert. Sure, you were allowed to leave if that's what you wanted, but unless you had a plan on how to make it to the other side, your ass was coyote meat.

I had a few thousand saved up from Sal's, and an old car of my own that ran okay (my friends and I always patched it up when it threatened to die on me; you did not grow up in my town and not know how to fix a car).

Maybe I had a nervous breakdown, maybe that's what it was. All I know is that I pulled up this dented old globe my dad had bought for us, and I looked down and saw Australia, and that was it. That's where I wanted to be. I threw my clothing into a duffel bag and left a note for my family, and patted the dog goodbye. I took my cash and myself and I got the hell out of Richardsburg.

I don't know what I was hoping to find in Australia. Something new, something exciting, maybe? Something that didn't involve mindless routine and Baptist potluck suppers.

There are a lot of American kids there doing the same thing. Australia isn't all sheep farms, although there are enough of those that you won't lack for work if you want it. We were ranch hands, and we washed dishes, and we smiled gamely and put up with their jokes about Americans. I made friends, and I sat with them outside on the wooden fences and smoked joints, and I told them stories about the imaginary girls I'd done back in Richardsburg. The good ladies of First Baptist would have had a heart attack if they'd heard my tales about those wild, wicked girls I'd grown up with.

I wrote to my family now and then, and if I was in any one place for more than a few weeks sometimes I heard back. It was always the same; stop this nonsense and come home. It was condescending; I was a wayward child unaware of the major mistakes he'd made, but it wasn't too late to do something about them.

The years went by again, a lot of years, and it happened that one day I woke up and looked around me, and suddenly had to go and get sick, and I realized that I hadn't escaped the feeling of despair, of being lost. I'd just hidden it for a while.

So what now, I thought? What do I do now? Do I go back home to Ohio? Do I go back to the life my father has planned for me? What should I do?

Then I thought, California. Maybe what I'm looking for is in California. I wasn't bad looking; maybe I could be an actor or something. That would be exciting. I had a rough edge women liked, and I could see myself burning up the screen as the next Clint Eastwood. I'd never done any acting in my entire life, but why let that stop me, I decided. I wasn't getting any younger; maybe I was already too old for it. They wanted kids, and I was no kid, but what did I have to lose?

So I once again packed up everything and I hopped on a plane back to the States with visions of fame and fortune in my head.

This wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

I wonder if they had a service for me at First Baptist? If the girls I'd went to school with were now good Baptist ladies who shushed their children and told each other that I would have made someone a good husband if I'd only stuck around. They'd whisper in secret whether or not I'd had 'legal problems' or 'drug problems' and that had driven me away. They'd go to my parents' house with casseroles and kind words, and so Sawyer would officially be laid to rest.

The problem with that was that I was still very much alive, and wouldn't have minded some of that casserole, but how could they possibly know that?

There are complications to going back now though, more of the unexpected, and tonight I'm sitting here on this beach trying to make some sense of all of it.

"It's going to rain again." He sits down next to me, his arm brushing against mine. "You should come back to the shelter now, before you get soaked."

"In a minute." I look at him, and he looks like a pirate, I think. Something torn out of the pages of a comic book, and he doesn't look like a mathematical genius or like the kind of man who can sing an ill child to sleep, or anything like the person he really is. He looks, I think, like the kind of man who would be beaten to death in Richardsburg. The kind of man I was taught to hate growing up.

"We should talk." His voice is low, because this is only between us. "About what happened earlier."

I don't respond and I stare out into the churning black waves.

"Are we so different?" He asks gently. "I was taught to hate you when I was a child, you were taught to hate me, and we were both taught to hate the idea of what happened between us earlier. Am I correct?"

I start to get up but his hand on my arm stops me. "Stay."

"I don't know why I did that." I say at last. "I keep trying to figure out why, and I can't."

"Because it's different here, because it was something we wanted, and we took it. Do you regret it?" He looks hard at me, and I want to lie, but instead I shake my head no. "I should but I can't."

He nods. "Neither can I. So what now?"

I am startled by this, because I'm not used to him asking what to do next. He just knows. He knew this afternoon, and he should know now, and the fact that he doesn't upsets me.

"What happens when we leave here?" I blurt out. "What happens when we both go back to our lives?"

"I don't know." He shakes his head, and there is sand trapped in that mess of curls. "But I know that here... here we can perhaps make our own rules. Our fathers aren't here to judge us now."

Light and dark, he and I. Yet somehow I think we've led parallel lives, and now here we are. I am terrified, more terrified than I was after the crash, or when I ran away from home. I am scared to death about what I let him do to me earlier today, and what I want him to do now. I have this image, and I've held on to it my whole life, and suddenly it's cracking and breaking and that scares me most of all. Because he sees me. For the first time in my life, someone actually sees me.

"Come back to the shelter" he repeats, and I know he doesn't mean the big shelters the others share. He means the little shelter he's built for himself, his own private island, and I feel raindrops on my skin.

"Okay." It is the hardest word I've ever said in my life.

He gets to his feet and heads toward our little remnant of civilization and I follow behind him as docile as a lamb behind his ewe.

Because for the first time in my life, I'm starting to know what I want.


	2. Here and Now

Here and Now

How can I defend what you find indefensible?

How can I ever explain to you that you would understand? You try, and I see you get that serious look on your face as you try and make sense of what I'm saying, but it is beyond you. That is not an insult to your intelligence, it is simply as if I was trying to describe the color blue to someone blind since birth. How accurate could his mental image be? How accurate could yours, with no frame of reference?

I will try, though. Do you have a relative that perhaps you are not overly fond of? An aunt, or an uncle? Maybe they drink too much, or have had trouble with the law, or perhaps they are cruel to the other members of your family? You do have someone like that; I see it in your eyes. You dislike them, or tell yourself you do, and the other members of your family shake their heads and gossip about them behind their backs. Still, at every family gathering you invite them anyway. If they need money, or help, your family competes to be the first to provide it. Because no matter how angry they make you, the heart of the matter is, they are still your flesh and blood. You have no problem with verbally tearing them apart, but should a stranger try it, should they insult that relative to your face, your blood would boil and you would fight to the death to defend them.

Homes, my friend, are like that as well. They live and breath, and become members of your family. As a child, you may hate your home, and long to leave it, and even as a man you might never wish to set foot in it again, but it is still your home and you still love it, no matter what. You would still risk it all to keep it safe, and perhaps once it is safe you would walk away and never return. Do you understand me now?

Better now, I believe. Not all the way, and never completely, but perhaps it is dawning on you that when I fought, I fought for love, not hate. I fought for the love of my country, as battered and bleeding as it was, because I could do nothing else and live with myself. Not him, I couldn't have cared less about my oath to defend him. I fought, in a sense, for my mother.

Yes, our lives were different, but not as different as you might imagine. You imagine us all living in tents in the middle of raging deserts, I suppose. Americans make me laugh; they are always so startled to see the things they take for granted taken for granted by others. Don't be offended by that, it's endearing in a way. I grew up with cars and electricity and television, the same as you did. Yes, there was heat, and yes there was sand, but there are heat and sand in a lot of places. If you're born in the ocean you swim in the ocean, and you never think about anything else.

Ah, the big question. Why did I leave? I could turn that around on you, you know. Why did you leave a home you loved? But you've already told me, and I suppose it's my turn.

I do not always believe that honesty is the best answer, you know that. Perhaps some things people are better off not knowing. My parents are still living, and my brothers, and the longer I stayed with them, the harder it became to keep my secrets my own. I was growing careless, and my older brother was beginning to suspect the truth about me. He never would have told my parents, but I could see the shame in his eyes, the disappointment. From a brother, it was like a knife in the gut. From my father and mother... I might not have survived the wound.

There is more than the obvious answer there, more than you think. I could tell you about being a small boy and kneeling facing Mecca over and over during the day, and wondering if I was wasting my time. I could tell you about the doubts that crept into my mind, about Allah, about the rules we lived by, about my life in general.

Had I stayed, they would have come for me, eventually. You can only hide yourself so long. Sooner or later, they would have come for me, and taken me away to be.... you don't have a word for it in English. Re-educated might be as close as you can come. Cured, they'd think of it. Contrary to what you might think, I wouldn't immediately have been put to death. I was young, and strong, and a good warrior. They would not have wanted to waste me. If I had resisted their cure, however, sooner or later I would have died. And my family would have been shamed forever as a result.

That sound noble, doesn't it? Me leaving them all behind to protect them, and that is part of the reason. But selfishly, I wanted to live. I wanted to live as I chose to live, if not accepted anywhere, then at least knowing that if I kept my wits about me I wouldn't be killed for it. I wanted a chance.

It's harder on you than it is on me. I have had many years to come to terms with my secret self, but you... you are still

struggling with it. It goes against what you have always believed to be true. You, who have loved women, and been loved by them. In your mind, it must always been black and white, one or another. There are so many shades in between that your basic nature recoils in horror from; you find gray so ugly you can't even stand to look at it.

Very well, my friend, if this will make it easier on you. Think of men in prison; not those forced but those who give freely, who look around the bleak and dismal place they've found themselves and find something shining and bright in the middle of it. Many of them have wives, children, lives, and when they are free they go back to them. Aren't we just prisoners here, Sawyer? If we are rescued tomorrow, I will still be me. You are free to go about your life and do as you please; I would not stand in your way.

You are afraid, though, that you can't. That after this, nothing will ever be the same. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps something is sprung within you, something that cannot ever be put back the way it is. Would you blame me for that? No, I can see that you do not. No one brings you here each night, after all. There are no bullets left in the gun, and I've never taken anything in my life that wasn't freely offered.

I think, though, that we're going to be here for a while. I can't explain the feeling any better than that, yet I wake up and look out into the water, and I get a sense of endlessness. Perhaps we will not die here, and perhaps we will not be old men when they do come for us, but we will be older men, wiser men perhaps.

And what if we do die here? Should our remaining years be alone, filled with regret? Mine will not be; I am going to find happiness here or die trying. I believe I can find that in you; I believe you can give me that. At the moment, we can offer comfort, warmth. Maybe in time, more than that. I think that I could fall in love with you; I flatter myself that someday you could fall in love with me. Who knows?

You ask me "What now?"

What now? Us, now.

After the now, I can't say.

But the now is here, the now is warm, and the now isn't going anywhere.

Not yet.


	3. Now and Then

Now and Then

Sawyer's POV:

Lately I've been thinking about this girl I used to know.

At six she was the perfect little doll; pale blonde hair, huge blue eyes, killer smile. Perfect smile, perfect girl. Her name should have been Elizabeth, but her parents had gotten cute with it and split it, so it was Eliza Beth. Eliza Beth Johnson.

Every Valentine's day all the boys in the class would compete to give Eliza Beth the prettiest handmade card, and she gave us all kisses in return for it. She had a sweet nature, our Eliza Beth. If she wasn't the smartest girl that ever lived, we didn't care. When she sang in the Children's Choir at church, that was the only time during the entire service that I really heard the Word of God.

And Eliza Beth made us all believe in God when we were teenagers. In the back of the movie theater, in the backseat of our cars, under the bleachers at the stadium. We all got to know Eliza Beth very well during those years. No one held it against her, and I don't remember ever hearing any of the nasty talk you usually hear about 'girls like that'.

Even though Eliza Beth was easier than instant pudding.

When Eliza Beth started getting sick in the morning, so did half the boys in town. To be honest, I don't know who was responsible. The baby looked a lot like Charlie McGee, and Eliza Beth said it was his, and old Charlie did what was expected of him and married her. That was all right before I left town. I heard later on that they had a nice happy marriage, and Eliza Beth popped out a lot of little McGees, and that was that.

You never forget your first love, they say, and I don't know that I did love Eliza Beth. I was fascinated with her, I was attracted to her, I dreamed about her. But I can't remember ever dreaming of being married to her, raising a family with her, growing old with her. If the baby had been mine, I would have married her, but I don't think it would have been a happy life. Sooner or later, I would have grown bored with her.

Maybe with me it's always been the hunt more than the kill. I loved going into nightclubs in Sydney, picking my prey from across the room, plotting my moves. I was a damn good hunter; I knew how to step lightly and I knew exactly the right words to say. I knew which game to go after, and which game to avoid.

I like steak. I think steak is wonderful. That doesn't mean that I want to eat steak every single meal for the rest of my life. Variety is the spice of life, and I was careful to avoid anyone who didn't believe that as well. I wasn't looking for a wife and kids; hell, I could have gone back home and had that easy enough. Anyone who looked like she was boyfriend/husband shopping I avoided like Black Death.

What I guess I'm trying to say to you is, don't expect too much out of this and don't expect too much out of me. Because maybe there isn't that much there to give. I liked Eliza Beth because we understood each other, we understood what we were in it for, and we didn't have unrealistic expectations of each other.

You take a tom cat, and you declaw him, and you chop his balls off, and what do you have left? Something mother nature never intended. Some kind of sick parody of what he used to be. That scares the hell out of me. The idea of getting all domestic and comfortable with someone scares me a hell of a lot more than the idea of that someone being another guy.

I just don't want there to be any misunderstanding between us, that's all. I'm not ready to be anyone's husband, and I'm sure as hell not willing to be anyone's wife.

Sayid's POV:

You mentioned cats, and that reminds me of Marid.

Marid was my cat when I was a boy. My father had found him half-starved in the streets and brought him home for us, thinking he'd catch the mice that kept getting into our grain. Marid did not disappoint him. He was a born hunter.

Marid also had an unusual trait about him. He hated closed doors. As long as the door to my room stood open, he would be content to sleep on my bed for hours. But the moment the door was shut, he would fuss and cry until I opened it again, and he would immediately flee to another part of the house or outside.

As long as I gave him the option to leave, he was content to stay by my side. So I learned at a very young age the value of giving freedom to those I care for.

Marid always returned to me. No matter where he roamed or how far, he always ended up back in my bed. Because he understood that no matter where he slept, only one place would ever truly be home.

Sawyer's POV:

When I wake up now, there are moments when I don't know where I am. I sometimes expect to see the walls of a hotel room, or the door of my car, or sometimes my old room at home. Then I see the woven walls, and I feel the breath against my neck, and I remember.

In the beginning, I always left before he awoke, but now sometimes I stay. I watch him sleep, watch his eyelids flutter in REM and I wonder what he's dreaming about. I never ask him and he doesn't offer to tell me.

If I wait long enough his eyes open, and I see the same sleepy confusion in them at first. Then his head tilts to the side and he smiles, and I can see that he's pleased I stayed the whole night with him. He reaches out and I'll feel the rough tips of his fingers against my forehead, then my right cheek, then my left one, and then finally against the tip of my nose. It's an odd little ritual of his, but I like it. If he sees that I'm agreeable, those touches may be followed by faint brushes of his lips, and if I'm agreeable to that, it may be quite some time before we get around to leaving his shelter and joining the others.

In the mornings I don't stay, I can't stay, I slip out of his shelter go down to the beach. I've decided that I love to go jogging in the sand as the sun is coming up, and before the other passengers are trooping down to bathe, or sun themselves, or go fishing. For just a little slice of time, the beach is mine.

Well, usually. Sometimes Walt's dog joins me on my run, and I don't mind that. The dog is a good listener, and Walt doesn't mind sharing him with me for a little while.

But lately, the mornings jogging with the dog are being outnumbered by the mornings with Sayid. I don't know how I feel about that, to be honest. It frightens me.

Today is a beach morning, and Vincent has beat me to it, already splashing in the waves. I begin my jog and he runs at my side, his tongue hanging out and his tail swishing back and forth. Alive, the doggy grin on his face seems to say. I'm ALIVE and I'm loving it!

I trip and fall down into the waves, and lie there on my back laughing, because it is a good morning, and I had one hell of a nice night, and more to look forward to.

And I am ALIVE.


End file.
